Unattended retail in Europe 2026: the numbers operators should know

Europe runs about 5 million vending and office-coffee machines, the industry turns over €26.4 billion a year, and the fastest-growing piece is the smart fridge. Those are the headline numbers from the two industry censuses published in the last twelve months. This note lists what they say, what they do not say, and what it means if you operate machines.

About 5 million machines, €26.4 billion a year

The European Vending & Coffee Service Association (EVA) publishes a market report every autumn. The 2025 edition, with data to the end of 2024, puts the installed base at roughly 5 million machines across Europe and total industry revenue at €26.4 billion. Growth has flattened: the report's own headline is that growth is slowing.

Two things to keep in mind when you quote the 5 million:

• It counts vending and office-coffee machines together. Hot-drink machines are 68 % of the installed base. The snack, cold-drink and food machines that can sell through a delivery app are the remaining third, roughly 1.6 million units.
• It is an installed-base figure, not a count of machines in public locations. A share of those machines sit inside workplaces behind a badge reader. EVA's public summary does not break that share out.

Sources: EVA, "New EVA market report reveals that growth is slowing" (20 Oct 2025); EVA, "EVA publishes its new market report on vending & OCS" for the hot-drink share.

Italy leads by machines, France by revenue, the Netherlands by use

Country	What the EVA report says
Italy	Largest machine base: 809,000 machines
France	Highest product revenue: €3.69 billion, ahead of Germany
Netherlands	Highest consumption: 5.66 billion vending transactions

EVA does not publish machine counts for the other countries in its public summary. If you see a per-country figure for Germany, the UK or Spain quoted without a source, treat it as an estimate.

Source: Vending Market Watch summary of the EVA 2024 report.

Smart fridges: +50 % in a year in the UK

The UK's Automatic Vending Association runs its own census. The 2025 edition, reported in May 2026, says standalone smart fridges grew about 50 % year on year to 2,850 units, micro-markets grew 8 % to 785 locations, and the whole UK unattended sector generated about $5.1 billion in 2025. Cashless is close to universal: 95 % of UK machines take cards or phones, and about 30 % no longer take cash at all.

The smart-fridge number is small next to 5 million, but it is the only category in these reports growing at that rate. It is also the category where delivery makes the most sense: a smart fridge holds fresh food, is open 24 hours, and already knows exactly what is inside it.

Source: Vending Times, "Smart fridges drive Britain's vending boom" (27 May 2026).

What none of these machines do yet

None of the 5 million machines can be ordered from on a delivery app. A customer who wants a snack at 23:00 opens Uber Eats or Wolt and sees restaurants and dark stores, not the fridge in the office lobby two streets away. That is a gap on both sides: the operator's machine is stocked and open but invisible, and the delivery platform has no supply in the hours when restaurants are closed.

Closing it needs three things the machine already has, exposed to the platform: live stock, a way to accept an order automatically, and a way for the courier to collect without staff. Smart fridges with a cloud connection have all three today. Spiral machines with telemetry have the first two and need a courier flow that works with the machine's own keypad; whether that is possible depends on the machine's MDB level, which is worth a note of its own.

What this means if you operate machines

• Growth in the machine base has flattened, so extra revenue has to come from the machines you already have, not from placing more of them.
• Evening and weekend hours are the obvious unused capacity. The machine is open; the demand is on the delivery apps.
• Smart fridges are the easiest place to start, because they already report stock per item and open remotely. Spiral machines come next, depending on the machine's controller.

PickVend connects vending machines and smart fridges to delivery platforms through the machine's own cloud. Platform access opens one platform and one country at a time, and we say plainly which is live where. Check whether your machine qualifies: pickvend.com/compatibility.

Is the 5 million figure comparable year to year?

Roughly. EVA has published the report for more than ten years with the same scope, so the trend (flat) is more reliable than any single year's total.

Does the EVA figure include smart fridges and micro-markets?

The EVA summary does not split them out. The UK AVA census does, which is why the smart-fridge growth figure comes from the UK only.

Where do the German, Dutch and Belgian machine counts come from?

Not from the EVA public summary. The German association BDV has quoted about 555,000 beverage and food vending machines in Germany in its 2016 study with EVA; newer public figures are hard to find. If you have a sourced number, we would like to see it.